Oliveros’ Soundscape Casts Elusive Spell

Just beneath the horizon of visibility in pop-culture-obsessed America, iconoclasts such as Pauline Oliveros still manage to carry on, pushing their radically different concepts of what music can be.

Oliveros’ main obsession has been her Cage-like concept of “deep listening”--listening to and processing everything that comes into one’s ears. The lawn at Schindler House in West Hollywood was packed solid Saturday night as Oliveros and shakuhachi virtuoso Philip Gelb put the practice to work--and sometimes, somehow, the desired meditative mood did take hold.

At first, the ever-present low roar of traffic overwhelmed the fragile shudders, shakings and drifting pitches of Gelb’s short solo piece, “Rain Sketch No. 6.” Yet Oliveros, in an accordion improvisation simply titled “Pauline’s Solo,” struck a balance with the environment, creating sustained clusters decorated by glittering, twinkling, high-pitched notes or droning bass chords, painting a soundscape that evoked the timbres of ambient electronic music. Suddenly, the occasional drone of a stray airplane or the distant sound of someone whistling seemed to blend into the mix, and tall trees swaying slowly in the wind seemed at one with the music’s implied rhythm.

But once the piece was over, a different environment intruded--the obligatory chatter, hubbub and extraneous noises of intermission--and that quickly dissipated the meditative mood. For some of us, Oliveros and Gelb couldn’t quite reestablish the earlier spell in their 34-minute duo improvisation afterward, where the sense of ebb and flow was sometimes broken by staccato flurries from their instruments, and the squiggle of a car alarm and roar of a helicopter became annoyances instead of condiments. Was it a question of conditioning on the listener’s part, or is it possible that the performers weren’t as inspired?